Sweet Ermengarde’s “Sacrifice” album front cover (detail) © BillyPhobia 2023
About Sweet Ermengarde’s “Sacrifice” digipak CD artwork
Once again, I’ve had the great pleasure and challenge to create the artwork for a release by Sweet Ermengarde. For those first-timers here, this band is one of the current pillars of Gothic Rock music. “Sacrifice” is the long awaited third full-length album by the Germans and will be physically release as digipak through the well-regarded record label Solar Lodge.
As there is no overall concept behind the songs, I’ve had enough free creative space this time, albeit subject to some conditions: giving continuity to the artwork I made for their previous vinyl single, “Typhonian Trance / Once You Break”, while carrying it over into a more Art Nouveau style. That fact is a double-edged weapon because it has its advantages but also inconveniences. Without an album’s central theme, it’s more difficult to find visuals that match at least most of the songs.
To achieve this, I paid attention to the moods and tempos, as well as the imagery and metaphors addressed in the lyrics. My main findings were that love and its loss, whether the latter is caused by break up, death or inhumanity, spreaded widely across the album. However, words also touch on afterlife, out of the body or spiritual journeys, understood as esoteric transformations or shamanic healings, to overcome the pain and meet the lost loved ones again. This is cohesively reflected in the music, where mighty and atmospheric passages alternate in a balanced way, even within the same song. Thus, helpless feelings like rage or despair give way to dreamy, zero-gravity states of listening.
Then, ideas like transcending death by love or reaching mystical enlightenment through sacrifice, started to rise in my mind. In order to shape these thoughts, I opted for giving a twist to the universal art concept of Ophelia’s death. A drowned young woman among lily pads sounded good to me as a starting point. It could follow up on the previous artwork and faithfully convey the message. Moreover, it lived up to the album’s title and gave me enough scope to play with Art Nouveau. The main difference is that this young woman is about to return to life in fullness and her left hand gives hints about why.
Sweet Ermengarde’s “Sacrifice” digital
Sweet Ermengarde’s “Sacrifice” digipak
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Sweet Ermengarde’s “Typhonian Trance / Once You Break” vinyl single artwork
